Quick takes on what’s happening in work, HR and transformation, as it happens.

In the early 1990s I worked for Motorola Semiconductors in East Kilbride. It was a fantastic organisation, and I credit it with many of the practices I still rely on as a leader and manager – project management, people management and capacity management among them. The learning was exceptional, and most of the leaders I worked with there taught me a great deal.

Latterly, every year or two, we ran a voluntary redundancy programme. This was an organisation where 20 and 25 years' service was common and celebrated. People had flexible working, decent pay and great leadership. Why would anyone leave?

I can’t help thinking about how many lessons my career has taught me, about what makes change succeed and how to avoid repeating the same mistakes. I was part of implementing shared services in the 1990s. Yes, that puts me at the more experienced end of the scale! But I value every one of those experiences, and I hope they make me wiser and of more value than ever.

My real concern is that we still don’t seem able to get the message to the people who most need to hear it and understand the impact of each decision they make. You cannot design work without first understanding it, or without trusting the people who do it.

Three days in the office? Fuel prices are rising again, and more people are doing the sums on what their office days actually cost them. A Mobilityways survey of UK commuters earlier this year found people were working from home an average of 1.7 days a week but would like 2.6 – and 45% of petrol and diesel drivers said rising fuel costs had already affected their commute.

When I wrote Three Days in the Office? You’re Starting With the Wrong Question, my argument was that the number was the wrong place to start. Start with the work, and the right pattern follows. That piece drew more conversation than anything else I’ve posted, and the debate clearly hasn’t gone away. It has simply picked up a new question: who pays for the commute?

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember how applying for a job used to work. You found the advert in the newspaper, wrote a covering letter, posted your CV and waited. Sometimes for weeks. When the reply came, it was often a no – but it came in a brown envelope, and somebody had read what you sent.

Today a vacancy can attract hundreds of applications within days. Some will have been written with AI, some will be screened by AI, and some candidates will never know whether a person looked at theirs at all.

I was scrolling through TikTok recently (purely for research, obviously) and came across a recipe I liked. The presenter said, “Comment ‘recipe’ and I’ll send it to you.” So I did.

Nothing else. That was the instruction, after all.

If video really did kill the radio star, what crime did podcasts commit? That question has been rattling round my head, mostly because of the way we’re talking about AI and jobs at the moment.

Video didn’t actually kill radio. Radio adapted. Then podcasts came along, took one of radio’s best qualities (people talking to people), removed the timetable and handed control to the listener. And now video is back. Podcasts are filmed, put on YouTube and chopped into clips for LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. You’ve probably scrolled past three today.